Comments

I wish had more luck with AmaroK. It always crashes on me. I do not like the aKode, aRTs or the xine engine. I'd like to use gstreamer, but it always crashes. I thought KDE3.4 would be better but there has never been any luck. I have already submitted the trace below to the developers. Sorry in advance. It's too long. Here we go: -

amaroK has crashed! We're terribly sorry about this :(

But, all is not lost! You could potentially help us fix the crash. amaroK has
attached a backtrace that describes the crash, so just click send, or if you
have time, write a brief description of how the crash happened first.

For amaroK (and probably most of KDE), bugs.kde.org is a place for bugs, not general tech support. Might find more luck in #amarok or the amaroK forums. Granted, I don't see what's wrong with xine... it uses less CPU then gstreamer and has less problems. If it works use it.

1) Though I can fully understand that it's kind of frustrating
to not even be able to use Amarok properly because it always
crashes - you could *at least* have filed a bug and linked to that bug instead of posting endless backtraces here.
2) Nevertheless to solve your problem you might want to consider
compiling gstreamer and gst-plugins by yourself instead of
using packages. Afterwards recompile Amarok. Only this way you
make sure that all fits together nicely. Packages can be
incompatible sometimes. Especially my experience with SuSE 9.2 RPMs
for GStreamer was very bad - somewhat understandable if you know
that 9.2 (and its GStreamer packages) are not a bit dated.
Recompiling did solve similar GStreamer problems for me. Before compiling Amarok make sure to test GStreamer functionality with sth. like

Make sure you run gst-register first to register all plugins after
compilation! Run gst-inspect to see if everything is needed is there.
I.E. Run:
gst-inspect | grep mad
To see if the mad-plugin is there (better make sure to compile
it when "configure"-ing gst-plugins
And:
gst-inspect | grep osssink

Dont use alsasink if you have problems - use osssink it's much more
stable. You dont need to specify alsasink or osssink in Amarok - only
when using the command-line. Amarok will detect this automatically.

If you dont already know (some Linux users unfortunately dont know
this) you should use "checkinstall" (goes with your distro) instead
of "make install" to create an RPM/DEB/whatever package so you can
easily remove/update this stuff.
On SuSE, edit /etc/checkinstallrc to say INSTALL=1 in the last line
and afterwards run
checkinstall --fstrans=no
instead of checkinstall.
Always hit enter and gstreamer/gst-plugins will be installed as RPM.
Sounds complicated, but it isnt in fact. Just follow the above
steps one-by-one.

Amazing work! And it is pretty stable. Only problem I have is with mplayer if kompmgr and transparency is enabled. If you know of a solution please help. One solution is to use kmplayer, which seems to work (but there are some screen redraw issues).

I was surprised at the performance of this thing - it works just fine, without any lag or something :) (previously when I tried enabling the composite manager, it was slow and buggy, but that was with xorg 6.8.1 and fluxbox). System is athlon xp 2400+, 512RAM, GeforceFX5200 with nvidia binary drivers, FreeBSD 5.4Prerelease.

I have a very similar system as you (2400+ Athlon running at 2G native, GeForceFX5200 w/128MB) but with Gigabyte mobo and 1 GB RAM running in dual channel (gotta love Gigabyte memory management).

I am now looking at a KDE desktop within a LiveCD version of PCLinuxOS. Its very neat. This OS loads up with Firefox 1.0, Flash, MPlayer, etc etc. I was able to look at these AVI files in Firefox, off this LiveCD. This is too easy.

I watched the Kompmgr video, looks kool. How does the user switch focus from one window to another when they are superposed? I suppose it must by by rolling the mouse wheel, right? looks kool anyway and nice to see that Zack's gonna work full time on improving X and thx to trolltec for that :)

"Focus Follows Mouse" means that when you move the mouse cursor over a window, it automatically brings that window into focus (possibly with a delay). That lets people focus on windows without bringing them to the front of the stack by clicking on them.

There are some patches to kwin/window decorations that allow you to switch window focus by using the mouse wheel over the title bar, though. You may be able to find them on kde-look.org, though they may be too out of date to work with KDE 3.4 and the like.

""Focus Follows Mouse" means that when you move the mouse cursor over a window, it automatically brings that window into focus (possibly with a delay)."

thx but that still doesn't answer my question. when one window is over another, how can the focus be changed? did u watch the video? the mouse cursor is still on the other window and then focus change to the other window that is behind it. How can that be? what if the user don't want to change focus, will it change automatically?

I'm not sure where the confusion is coming from here, but I didn't do anything special. I'll try to detail everything.

- Konversation is on top of Konqueror
- I move the mouse to Konqueror and focus changes ("Focus Follows Mouse"), but it is not raised. Konversation is still on top.
- Konsole is also on top of Konqueror
- I move the mouse to Konsole, same deal. Focus change.
- I move the mouse back to Konqueror. I Alt-LeftClick to position the window. This is my first time clicking anywhere. Note that this does not raise the window. Konqueror is still under Konversation and Konsole.
- I move back to Konversation and it is focused.

Does this help? When I move the mouse to a new window, the focus changes, but nothing is raised. No magic on my part... :)

Probably problems are related to hardware. I run both SUSE and vanilla kernels ( currently running 2.6.12-rc1-bk1 on x86-64 ) and seems that even with this latest kernel, sticking in USB memory stick causes machine to crawl for a few seconds. With SUSE kernel keyboard occasionally does not initialize during boot - and replugging it doesn't help.

USB works flawlessly for me in FreeBSD/KDE, but despite all the myths that it's ready for the desktop, USB is horribly flaky for me in Windows XP SP2 on a work system!!! In terms of USB mass storage, some actually freeze the machine until you yank them out. Others only freeze the machine when you try to "remove" them. And then the ones that work like to steal a mapped network drive. I've had nothing but heartache with USB under Windows.

I have USB problems 50% of the time too but only when using Konqueror to copy files to or from the USB stick (freecom). It just kills the machine stone dead either when copying data or when i've selected something to copy and right click and navigate through the menus to get to "Copy to". I have no problems copying via the command line.

Yeah, I had problems on all my SuSE 9.1 systems *AFTER* I upgraded the kernel and the libs. Everytime I plugged ANY USB device, the system simply crashed. I'm now using SuSE 9.2 on all my systems, and everything works fine.